1. What is the difference between MeSince® and other email client software?

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Currently, there are many email clients in the market that can meet the receiving and sending email requirement, but all don’t support S/MIME email encryption automatically, while some support manually setting the certificate encryption, and some do not support certificate encryption at all.

There is no need for MeSince users to care about the following headache things:

(1) what an email certificate is;

(2) how and where to apply the email certificate and how much it cost;

(3) how to install and configure the email certificate;

(4) how to use the certificate for email encryption and signing;

(5) how to exchange public key with the recipient;

(6) how to send encrypted email;

(7) how to securely store the certificate;

(8) how to export the certificate to install it in another device;

(9) how to prove the email sending time is true;

(10) how to set the complex email server parameters.

MeSince users just need to setup their email account and login the email client software as usual, write email and send it, all emails are encrypted and signed automatically. MeSince help you easily send encrypted mail with zero threshold.

MeSince® supports both the PC (Windows) and mobile device (Android and IOS), to let you easily send and receive encrypted email on any platform and any device at any time, and the email is encrypted to protect the security of your confidential information.

If you want to decrypt the encrypted email by MeSince in Linux and MacOS, you need to export the certificate and install it into the other email client software in those OS. MeSince will release Linux and MacOS version soon. MeSince support S/MIME standard and has good interoperability with all other email client software that supports S/MIME. It can encrypt and decrypt emails with each other.

MeSince follows the S/MIME standard, as shown in the following screenshot, the encrypted mail sent from MeSince can also be decrypted and displayed in other email client software that supports the S/MIME standard, such as: Outlook (Windows version), Thunderbird (Windows version), iPhone Mail (only a few examples, does not mean only support these).

MeSince(iPhone)MeSince(Windows)

Outlook(Windows)Thunderbird(Windows)

iMail(iPhone)

2. Why We Should Encrypt All Emails?

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Email encryption is actually very important for two reasons.

(1) for Privacy

Firstly, there's the obvious one. What most people don't realize is that the technologies that are used to bounce email around the Internet were developed over 53 years ago, in a time when pretty much everything was in the clear and nobody ever anticipated the privacy issues that would face us today. While it's a buzzword of acronyms like SMTP, POP3, and IMAP, the bottom line is that all of these protocols operate "in the clear" (unencrypted) by default.

While SSL connections can be used to secure all of these protocols, this is often only realistically done between you and your email provider. So, your messages are encrypted in transit when you download them and encrypted before being submitted to your ISP or provider's email server when you send them. Providing, of course, you've correctly configured your email client to use SSL encryption.

However, once your message is delivered to your upstream email server, it then gets transmitted from server-to-server across the Internet. Usually, that's only a single transfer from your mail provider directly to the recipient's, but in some cases, it can go through other intermediate servers as well. Your email message is likely transmitted "in the clear" between these servers, as most providers don't use SSL connections when transmitting email due to the extra cost and compatibility reasons. Further, SMTP uses a "store-and-forward" design, which means that while your email message is in transit, it's sitting in mail server queues on somebody else's hard drive, readable by anybody with access to that server, either deliberately or inadvertently, and everything unencrypted in there is in completely readable text and can be read as simply as opening a file in Notepad. So, email encrypted before sending is for guarantee that your message can't be read in the transmission.

(2) for Business

Email has become the most essential part to the productivity of today's business. Recent studies show that office employee's main collaboration tool is an email. In today's date, it's hard to find any organization who is not using email service to conduct any day-to-day business activities. Research shows, on an average user sends & receives more than 40,000 emails per year & spends more than 2 hours a day emailing.

Further, about 20 to 25 percent of emails contain attachments and comprise 98 percent of email traffic volume. Rather than send the attachments to the appropriate data storage centers, employees often use email folders as a personal storage center. Thus, much of a company's most sensitive information is sitting in an employee's inbox as a file attachment. So, you can say that about 75% of an organization's intellectual property is in an email or an attachment.

But the email is default as plain text that go through many mail servers, it is not encrypted, organizations could face several consequences including data breach which can be dangerous for the whole organization. So, Email encryption is necessary and important not only for the organization but for everyone who use email service. It helps you to protect sensitive information in email and protect from spam messages, phishing attacks, if any malicious code is being used to deliver emails, DDoS attacks and even the insider threat.

Encrypted email protects the privacy of the message by converting it from readable plain text format to scrambled cipher text which cannot be read. Only the recipient who has the private key that matches the public key used to encrypt the message can decipher the message for reading. Any recipient without the corresponding private key sees corrupted text.

It is better not only encrypting the email, but also digitally signing the email with verified identity certificate to give proof of its originality and real identity, which is really a big deal for fraud prevention and gaining trust in eCommerce communication.

At present, the global Internet security industry is promoting the "HTTPS only", because http is a plain text transmission. We firmly believe that with the efforts of MeSince, the simplification and automation of the complex S/MIME encryption will quickly spread and widely use in business and personal email communication. MeSince promote the "S/MIME only" to fully achieve end-to-end encryption for all messages and completely protect the Internet users' information security and privacy.

3. What is S/MIME encryption? Why MeSince use S/MIME instead of PGP encryption?

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S/MIME is the abbreviation for Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, which is an international standard protocol based on PKI technology and used to sign and encrypt email body via digital certificate. The advantage is that the email is not only encrypted, but also signed with the sender's real identity information verified by CA, so that the recipient can confirm the sender's real identity.

The PGP encryption method means the sender himself create the encrypting certificate to encrypt the email; there is no trusted identity information in the certificate, and it is only for encryption. MeSince® thinks that PGP is not suitable for eCommerce communication. It's as important as email encryption to make sure of the sender's real identity.

At present, the popular email client software such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple iMail all support S/MIME encryption. MeSince® uses S/MIME standard to sign and encrypt email so that any email client software that supports S/MIME can cooperate with MeSince for decrypting encrypted messages, just need to export the certificate and install it in other email client software.

NIST SP 800-177 "Trustworthy Email" Security Recommendation 5-4: Do not use OpenPGP for message confidentiality. Instead, use S/MIME with a certificate that is signed by a known CA. And Security Recommendation 4-11: Use S/MIME signatures for assuring message authenticity and integrity.

4. What's time stamp? Why MeSince add a timestamp to every outgoing email? What is the special feature?

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A timestamp is to add the time information in a file with digital signature, which can effectively prove the file created time. Since the email is invented and widely used, the sending time is the user's computer time that the sender can modify and that cannot be verified and untrustworthy.

To add a trusted time stamp to every outgoing email is the patent pending technology of MeSince®. MeSince doesn't use the computer time to be the email sending time. It uses a time signed by a trusted timestamp server and attaches it to the sender's digital signature that is sent together with the email. Once MeSince APP receives such email, it will read and verify the timestamp server signature data and take out the trusted time as the sending time of the email and display this time instead of the sending time of traditional emails.

This solution ensures that the sent time of the email is verified and trusted, and it can be used for a variety of scenarios where the sent time of the email is required, for example, when there's a need to prove the email was indeed sent before a deadline, the email content signed with the trusted sent time data can be treated as evidence of litigation cases etc.

MeSince adopts the international standard RFC3161 timestamp, and in order to reduce the timestamp data added to the email, MeSince does a technical innovation improvement on the standard time stamp signature data, reducing the size of a timestamp data to 88% off a standard one. At the same time, we apply technical protection measure to prevent re-timestamp, which effectively protects original timestamp from replacing and truly ensures authenticity and non-repudiation to the sending time of an email.

Just like postal mail must be stamped with rubber stamp, send email should also be stamped with the timestamp, only MeSince support this special feature for you for free.

5. What special innovation does MeSince have in UI design?

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The advantage of MeSince is that it encrypts every outgoing email. Therefore, we highlight this point in the design of the user interface so that the user clearly knows whether the received email has been encrypted, whether the email has a digital signature, whether the sender's identity is verified and which verification level, whether the message has a timestamp, and if it is a signing email and/or an encryption email, you can see that the certificate was used to sign and/or to encrypt, these important information are clearly displayed on the user interface.

MeSince not only send encrypted email automatically as default, but also makes encryption transparent, allowing users to clearly understand and be confident that emails are encrypted, to know which certificates are used for encrypting and which certificate is used for signing, to identify the fraud email easily. Please also refer to the MeSince UI Icon Meaning for details.